Field Notes.

When a founder-operator introduces AI agents into business operations, the initial instinct is almost always protective: require an owner or senior manager to sign off on every individual action. It...

Kurt Fischman · Oct 4, 2026

Every founder running a business between one million and ten million dollars reaches a point where manual reporting becomes unsustainable. As marketing programs expand across Google Ads, Meta...

Kurt Fischman · Oct 3, 2026

For a founder running a business between $1M and $10M in revenue, cash flow friction rarely begins with bad intentions. It begins with administrative silence.

Kurt Fischman · Oct 1, 2026

Every accounting firm knows the January dread. Preparers sit ready at their dual monitors, practice management software is configured, and yet almost no actual tax preparation occurs. Instead, staff...

Kurt Fischman · Sep 24, 2026

When a prospective client contacts a law firm, the clock starts running immediately. In legal services, responsiveness often determines whether a firm signs a desirable matter or loses it to the...

Kurt Fischman · Sep 24, 2026

Most AI business cases presented to business owners are built on an accounting illusion. A vendor or internal advocate tallies up minutes saved across routine tasks, multiplies that time by an...

Kurt Fischman · Sep 22, 2026

When a founder signs a contract for a static website or an accounting software rollout, the finish line is straightforward. The pages render, the bank feeds sync, the invoices reconcile, and the...

Kurt Fischman · Sep 21, 2026

Over the past two years, almost every founder running a $1M to $10M company has handed generative AI tools to their staff. You bought seats for chat interfaces, added AI writing assistants to your...

Kurt Fischman · Sep 14, 2026

When Anthropic shipped Claude Cowork, it gave knowledge workers a tool that feels like a breakthrough. Instead of pasting paragraphs back and forth into a browser window, you can point Claude at...

Kurt Fischman · Sep 14, 2026

A sales call closes, the contract gets signed, and the client appears eager to get started. The sales team logs the win, marks the deal closed in the CRM, and hands off the account to operations. On...

Kurt Fischman · Sep 13, 2026

In 2011, three researchers audited 2,241 U.S. companies by sending each one a web lead and timing the answer. Thirty-seven percent replied within an hour, 16% within one to 24 hours, and 24% took...

Kurt Fischman · Sep 11, 2026

Almost every quote you'll see for an AI agent prices one line: the subscription, or the model usage per task. An agent, in the sense that matters here, is software that carries out a multi-step job...

Kurt Fischman · Sep 10, 2026

Picture the ordinary version of the problem. It's a Friday evening. An AI agent your business bought in March, the one that answers inbound calls and books appointments, has just booked three jobs...

Kurt Fischman · Sep 9, 2026

Most lists of this kind fail the same way. They name a department, attach the word automation, and leave you guessing what the software actually does on a Tuesday afternoon. So every job here is...

Kurt Fischman · Sep 9, 2026

Type the question into a search box and you get forty pages explaining that assistants are reactive and agents are proactive. Fine. Accurate, even. It's also the least useful thing anyone can tell a...

Kurt Fischman · Sep 8, 2026

Search the phrase and you'll hit a product category first. In April 2026 Anthropic launched Managed Agents on Claude, which InfoQ described as a managed execution layer that separates agent logic...

Kurt Fischman · Sep 8, 2026

An AI agent is software that doesn't just answer questions, it takes actions: it reads your data, calls your tools, and changes things in your systems. That last part is the whole security problem. A...

Kurt Fischman · Sep 7, 2026

An AI agent is software that takes a goal, plans a few steps, and uses other systems to finish the job. That last part is what makes it different from a chatbot, and it is the part that gets...

Kurt Fischman · Aug 31, 2026

Google's first page for AI agent governance describes controls in exhaustive detail and dates almost none of them. An AI agent, for this purpose, is software that takes actions inside your real...

Kurt Fischman · Aug 30, 2026

An AI agent governance policy template is a document with numbers in it: dollar ceilings, named systems, named tools, one named approver, and a retention period. An AI agent, for the purposes of that...

Kurt Fischman · Aug 30, 2026